“Sell me one of your papers,” he said.  “No, don’t bother about the change.  The Cause can let itself go on the odd elevenpence.  Well, I think you’re wonderful to stand out here in this awful weather with all these blighters going by.”

“When one is wrapped up in a great Cause,” replied Ellen superbly, “one hardly notices these minor discomforts.  Will you not take a ticket for the meeting next Friday at the Synod Hall?  Mrs. Ormiston and Mrs. Mark Lyle are speaking.  The tickets are half-a-crown and a shilling.  But you’ll find the shilling ones quite good, for they’re both exceptionally clear and audible speakers.  Women are.”

“Next Friday?  Yes, I can come up that night.  Are you taking the chair, or seconding the resolution, or anything like that?”

“Me?  Mercy, no!” gasped Ellen.  Had he really been taken in by her bluff that she was grown-up?  For she had a feeling, which she would never admit even to herself but which came to her nearly every day, that she was a truant child masquerading in long skirts, and that at any moment someone might come and with the bleak unanswerable authority of a schoolmistress order her back to her short frocks and the class-room.  But this was nonsense, for she really was grown-up.  She was seventeen past and earning.  “No.  I’ll be stewarding and selling literature.”

“Good.”  He handed her half-a-crown and took the ticket from her, folded it across, hesitated, and asked appealingly:  “I say, hadn’t you better write your name on this?  I once went to a Suffrage meeting in Glasgow and they wouldn’t let me in because they thought I looked the sort of person who would interrupt.  But if you wrote your name on my ticket they’ll know I’m all right.”  He gave her a pencil-stump, and as she wrote reflected:  “How do I come to be such a fluent liar?  I didn’t get it from my mother.  No, not from my mother.  I suppose my father had that vice as well as the others.  But why am I taking so much trouble to find out about this little girl—­I who don’t care a damn about anything or anybody?”

* * * * *

He smiled when he took back the card, and with some difficulty, for she had tried to impart an impressive frenzy to her round hand, read her signature.  Ellen Melville was a ridiculous name for one of the most beautiful people who have ever lived.  It was like climbing to a towered castle on a high eagle-haunted cliff and finding that it was called “Seaview.”  She was amazingly beautiful now, burning against the grey weather with her private fire; and she had been beautiful the night before, in that baggy blue overall that only the most artless female creature would have worn.  But she had looked even younger then; he remembered how, as she had opened the door, she had lifted a glowing and receptive face like a child who had been having a lovely time at a party.  It occurred to him to question what the lovely time that she had been having in that dreary office could possibly